Red Hat, Inc. on Monday announced Red Hat CloudForms 3.1, the next version of its open hybrid cloud management solution, available in September 2014. Red Hat CloudForms 3.1 extends enterprise-grade cloud management across private, public and hybrid clouds with additional management features, capabilities and enhancements for OpenStack, Amazon Web Services, VMware and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization environments, as well as new support for Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager private clouds.

CloudForms 3.1 is the first release built from the open source ManageIQ community, introduced in May 2014. Red Hat acquired ManageIQ in December 2012 and fully open sourced the code earlier this year to drive innovation in hybrid cloud management through community-powered innovation.

Private and Public Cloud Platform SupportCloud platforms are constantly evolving, and management solutions need to keep pace with the rate of change for each platform. With CloudForms, Red Hat is committed to providing the industry’s most robust management experience for users across multiple platforms. CloudForms 3.1 adds significant capabilities for rapidly-evolving OpenStack clouds, as wells as new support for Microsoft private clouds, extended integration with Amazon Web Services, VMware, and Red Hat clouds - all driven by enterprise customer use cases and implementations. CloudForms 3.1 adds new capabilities for the following cloud platforms:

Amazon Web Services - enhancements include support for Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) as well as service catalog integration for Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Storage (S3) and Relational Database Service (RDS)

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager - added as a new CloudForms managed platform, with support for discovery, analysis, reporting and operations.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization - support for provisioning enhancements and support for Cloud-init for guest setup and configuration. Administrators often want to do some configuration to deployed virtual instances after booting. CloudForms now leverages Cloud-init through RHEV to let administrators automatically install packages, start services, or manage the deployed instance configuration after boot, before the user accesses it.

New Features and CapabilitiesIn addition to updating its broad set of OpenStack capabilities and enhancements for other cloud platforms, CloudForms updates the features users have come to enjoy from Red Hat’s robust cloud management platform.

Upgraded user experience, thanks to an enhanced service catalog, streamlined provisioning dialogs, added import/export functions for dashboard widgets and dialogs, and a set of enhanced UI wizards to speed creation of automation workflows;

Enhanced automation enables CloudForms 3.1 users to better streamline their workflow execution, domain automation sequences and priority controls. New version and namespace management for change control is also available to use ManageIQ community content and plugins; and

Expanded integration in CloudForms 3.1, introducing a comprehensive set of REST APIs to enable support for integration into other systems management tools and processes, including service provisioning automation, configuration and state information.

Other new additions to CloudForms 3.1 help link its management properties to the rest of Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud portfolio and cloud products.

Increased security ships as a virtual appliance based on SELinux, along with integration supporting federated single sign-on through Red Hat Identity Management.

New interoperability with Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) enables OpenShift by Red Hat brokers and nodes to advertise services easily in CloudForms service catalogs.

Virtual Application Appliances (VAA) decouple an application from the operating system (OS) and its underlying infrastructure. The resultant virtual application appliance contains an application with its dependencies, but with zero operating system (zeOS) component. The aim of VAAs is to enable enterprises to provision server based applications to any machine in the data center in a matter of seconds or move an application from the data center to the cloud (D2C).

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